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Rational Man on the Dark Margin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
Extract
The lady in Muriel Spark’s latest novel, eagerly looking out for her murderer, was surely an anthropologist manquée. For one element in the anthropologist’s complex fate is the dialectical compulsion to achieve the synthesis of contraries. The anthropologist’s charter— the cohesiveness and interpretability of all the works of social man— is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment surely; yet this volume suggests that it is in the very area where the hidden and the hateful come nearest to receiving the guilty approval of social man that anthropologists can do their finest work, marked by that passionate rationality and clear-eyed empathy which do at times reward painstaking research and patient reading. It is true that the best essays are by historians, or by anthropologists using history to gain a wider range; but the historians, Professor Norman Cohn, Mr Peter Brown, Dr Alan Macfarlane, and Mr Keith Thomas, have adopted the anthropological approach, which examines the interplay of ideology and institution, rather than work in the historian’s tradition of the placing of men in their milieu.
This collection, then, dedicated to exploring the dark margin of society’s self-consciousness, is intended as a commemoration of Professor Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the A'zande. Now this is one of the classics of anthropology in more than one sense. The ease of style depends on the extreme clarity of the underlying thought, and this in turn is the fruit of the prolonged, patient absorbing of an enormous mass of material.
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- Copyright © 1971 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Witchraft, Confessions and Accusations edited by Douglas, Mary, Tavistock Publishers Ltd. A.S.A. Monographs 9, pp. xxviii, 387, London 1970Google Scholar. 63s. (£3.15).
1 First printed Oxford, clarendon Press, 1937.
1 For a special case in point, namely the sociology of joking see a fascinating article by Mary Douglas, ‘The social control of cognition; some factors in joke perception’, in Man, September 1968 pp. 361‐376, and from a rather different viewpoint, Abner Cohen, ‘Political Anthropology; the analysis of the symbolism of power relations’, in Man, June 1969, pp. 215‐236.
1 Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, p. 179.
1 See the whole of chapter I of part Two of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic:‘How witch‐doctors conduct a seance’.
1 P. xx.
1 For a statement of this point of view see Rodney Needham's introduction to Primitive Classification by E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, Routledge paperback, 1970, pp. xlii to xliv.
1 M. Douglas, introducton to Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, p. xxiii.
1 See also her contribution to Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, edited by Middleton, John and Winter, E. H., London 1963Google Scholar.
1 To quote her actual words, witchcraft ‘should have been at Stage 2 and well out of control when it was being observed in Africa in the 1940‐1960 period—precisely the time it was felt to slot so well into the homeostatic functional theory’(Introduction, p. xxi). Mrs Douglas was not herself a propagandist of ‘the homeostatic functional theory’ and considers that those who used it ignored the contrast between their working theory and their overallscheme. Surely she is herself over‐simplifying in failing sufficiently to recognize how much the fieldwork undertaken in what were then Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland under the leadership of Professor Gluckman did to break the hold of naive equilibrium functionalism.
1 In Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, p. 120.
1 Dr Ardener's five‐phase sequence covers a period of more than a hundred years among the Bakweri. Mr Thomas and Dr Macfarlane consider a slightly shorter period in the county of Essex. Mr Brown and professor Cohn cover hundreds of years and several countries. One wonders if the turning of attention to witchcraft by the inquisitors, to which Norman Cohn draws our notice, was due to the final extinction of Catharism in precisely the same period, the second quarter of the fourteenth century. And what was the role of the friars in building up syntheses of fear in which the suspicions of the simple and the paranoia of the learned could find common ground? Less, perhaps, than the production of the Malleus Maleficarum suggests. However, Dr Brain in his paper on the Bangwa gives and example of modern missionary activity providing ideological support for a new pattern of witchcraft beliefs.
1 Introduction, pp. xxxiii.
1 Pp. xxxv.
1 P. 31 (Mr Brown gives the exact reference for anybody interested in checking).
1 Two of the remaining studies may be mentioned: Dr Jones' attempt to find correlations between land shortage and witchcraft fears in Eastern Nigeria, and Dr Willis' suggestion that anti‐witchcraft movements are much nearer to millenial movements and revolutionary situations than has been recognized.